The Caste Question

The Caste Question

Author: Anupama Rao

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0520943376

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This innovative work of historical anthropology explores how India's Dalits, or ex-untouchables, transformed themselves from stigmatized subjects into citizens. Anupama Rao's account challenges standard thinking on caste as either a vestige of precolonial society or an artifact of colonial governance. Focusing on western India in the colonial and postcolonial periods, she shines a light on South Asian historiography and on ongoing caste discrimination, to show how persons without rights came to possess them and how Dalit struggles led to the transformation of such terms of colonial liberalism as rights, equality, and personhood. Extending into the present, the ethnographic analyses of The Caste Question reveal the dynamics of an Indian democracy distinguished not by overcoming caste, but by new forms of violence and new means of regulating caste.


Politics in India

Politics in India

Author: Rajni Kothari

Publisher: Orient Blackswan

Published: 1970

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 9788125000723

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Acclaimed to be by far the most sophisticated general study on Indian politics. Politics in India unfolds, here with insight and acumen and the vastness and confusion of the Indian political scene is elaborately discussed. This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the Indian political system examined from different vantage points and drawing together the contribution of various disciplines into a common framework.


Outcaste Bombay

Outcaste Bombay

Author: Juned Shaikh

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2021-04-25

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0295748516

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Over the course of the twentieth century, Bombay’s population grew twentyfold as the city became increasingly industrialized and cosmopolitan. Yet beneath a veneer of modernity, old prejudices endured, including the treatment of the Dalits. Even as Indians engaged with aspects of modern life, including the Marxist discourse of class, caste distinctions played a pivotal role in determining who was excluded from the city’s economic transformations. Labor historian Juned Shaikh documents the symbiosis between industrial capitalism and the caste system, mapping the transformation of the city as urban planners marked Dalit neighborhoods as slums that needed to be demolished in order to build a modern Bombay. Drawing from rare sources written by the urban poor and Dalits in the Marathi language—including novels, poems, and manifestos—Outcaste Bombay examines how language and literature became a battleground for cultural politics. Through careful scrutiny of one city’s complex social fabric, this study illuminates issues that remain vital for labor activists and urban planners around the world.


The Imaginary Institution of India

The Imaginary Institution of India

Author: Sudipta Kaviraj

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010-05-06

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0231152221

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"The Imaginary Institution of India is the first major collection of Sudipta Kaviraj's essays and as such, will be received with great curiosity and attention."-Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California, Los Angeles --


Modern Indian Political Thought

Modern Indian Political Thought

Author: Bidyut Chakrabarty

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-29

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 1000963535

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is an unconventional articulation of the political thinking in India in a refreshingly creative manner in more than one way. Empirically, the book becomes innovative by providing an analytically more grasping contextual interpretation of Indian political thought that evolved during the nationalist struggle against colonialism. Insightfully, it attempts to unearth the hitherto unexplored yet vital subaltern strands of political thinking in India as manifested through the mode of numerous significant socio-economic movements operating side by side and sometimes as part of the mainstream nationalist movement. This book articulates the main currents of Indian political thought by locating the text and themes of the thinkers within the socio-economic and politico-cultural contexts in which such ideas were conceptualised and articulated. The book also tries to analytically grasp the influences of the various British constitutional devices that appeared as the responses of the colonial government to redress the genuine socio-economic grievances of the various sections of Indian society. The book breaks new ground in not only articulating the main currents of Indian political thought in an analytically more sound approach of context-driven discussion but also provokes new research in the field by charting a new course in grasping and articulating the political thought in India. This volume will be useful to the students, researchers and faculty working in the fields of political science, political sociology, political economy and post-colonial contemporary Indian politics in particular. It will also be an invaluable and interesting reading for those interested in South Asian studies.


Dominance and State Power in Modern India

Dominance and State Power in Modern India

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"In these two volumes, scholars of political science, sociology, and history adopt a common set of concepts to analyse patterns of change in the ideological and structural foundations of dominance in India from the colonial period to the mid-1980s. Departing from modernist theories, these scholars set out an interactional framework of society-state relations where caste, class, ethnicity, and dominance are treated as structures and processes, interacting with each other and with increasingly powerful state institutions. These comparative studies provide an explanation of how state policies undermine the religious legitimacy of the hierarchical social order and, at the same time, facilitate the manipulation of linguistic, communal, caste, and ethnic loyalties to diffuse class polarization. The analyses show that subordinate low caste-cum-class groups are mounting increasingly militant challenges to the hold of the upper castes and classes over state instiitutions which have provided the most important avenue of social mobility in modern India"--Provided by publisher.


Creative Pasts

Creative Pasts

Author: Prachi Deshpande

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007-05-08

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0231511434

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The "Maratha period" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when an independent Maratha state successfully resisted the Mughals, is a defining era in the history of the region of Maharashtra in western India. In this book, Prachi Deshpande considers the importance of this period for a variety of political projects including anticolonial/Hindu nationalism and the non-Brahman movement, as well as popular debates throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concerning the meaning of tradition, culture, and the experience of colonialism and modernity. Sampling from a rich body of literary and cultural sources, Deshpande highlights shifts in history writing in early modern and modern India and the deep connections between historical and literary narratives. She traces the reproduction of the Maratha period in various genres and public arenas, its incorporation into regional political symbolism, and its centrality to the making of a modern Marathi regional consciousness. She also shows how historical memory provided a space for Indians to negotiate among their national, religious, and regional identities, pointing to history's deeper potential in shaping politics within thoroughly diverse societies. A truly unique study, Creative Pasts examines the practices of historiography and popular memory within a particular colonial context, and illuminates the impact of colonialism on colonized societies and cultures. Furthermore, it shows how modern history and historical memory are jointly created through the interplay of cultural activities, power structures, and political rhetoric.


Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age

Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age

Author: Susan Bayly

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-02-22

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 9780521798426

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The phenomenon of caste has probably aroused more controversy than any other aspect of Indian life and thought. Susan Bayly's cogent and sophisticated analysis explores the emergence of the ideas, experiences and practices which gave rise to the so-called 'caste society' from the pre-colonial period to the end of the twentieth century. Using an historical and anthropological approach, she frames her analysis within the context of India's dynamic economic and social order, interpreting caste not as an essence of Indian culture and civilization, but rather as a contingent and variable response to the changes that occurred in the subcontinent's political landscape through the colonial conquest. The idea of caste in relation to Western and Indian 'orientalist' thought is also explored.


The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

Author: John Zavos

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The papers in this volume investigate the association between politics and cultural mobilization, and the possibilities it creates for a rethinking of the relationship. The volume isolates two trends in fragmentation of Indian politics: the impact of cultural mobilization on the fragmentation of identity and the increasing regionalization of the Indian political system.